This Is the Android Fitness Tracker You've Been Waiting For

Every fitness tracker always seems to have a few limits. Some can’t track your intensity properly and others can’t follow you into the pool. Some make streaming and uploading music a headache, and others don’t play nice with your favorite third-party apps.

And then there’s Samsung’s Gear Fit2 Pro. It’s the company’s third try at a fitness-focused smart watch, and Android gym fans need look no further. The Fit2 Pro does everything you could need in a user-friendly way, and some new bits of integration allow it to offer even deeper details about both your workout and your day in general.

The look doesn’t change much from last year, although the display is slightly smaller, 1.5 inches diagonally, down from 1.58 inches. The change in size is barely noticeable, though, especially because the screen is still bright and lustrous.

Samsung changed up its strap, though, opting for a traditional buckling strap. It’s a welcome change from last year’s toggle, which wore down with prolonged usage. The attachments to the watch face are also sturdier; a year ago, if I tightened the strap enough, the attachments would occasionally disconnect near the watch face. I’ve had no such issues this year.

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The body of the Fit2 Pro is also now more useful. The display is again Gorilla-glass-coated, so you can bang your Pro around at the gym and it’ll still function well. Even better, instead of merely being water-resistant, the Fit2 Pro is now fit to take for a swim, one of the biggest difference-makers this year. A year ago, the Fit2 Pro was of no use if you were into swimming workouts.

Now, it can be your best underwater friend, tracking your heart rate and distance traveled in the pool. Better yet, if you never want to take off the Fit2 Pro, you almost never have to, except when you need to charge it, which, in practice, will wind up being about every other day.

Samsung

The other workout components of the Fit2 Pro are also much stronger than they’ve been in the past. There’s GPS inside, so you can take a run with only your Fit2 Pro and have it track your path instead of needing to tote your phone around.

At times, you’ll almost wish Samsung outfitted the Fit2 Pro with 4G LTE like the S3 Frontier smartwatch. Had that been the case, you could easily go for a run, then pay for a bottled water at the convenience store without having your phone anywhere near you. Not that you can blame Samsung: It worked to craft an ultra-slim, ultra-light, fitness-focused device here, and that 4G tech would have made this thing bigger.

Samsung wants the Fit2 Pro small, but big on useful features instead. And hardcore training folks will find plenty of useful workout features here thanks to smart app integration. MyFitnessPal and MapMyRun integration is here, creating a fuller app ecosystem, and UnderArmour’s UA Record app will shine in just about any workout situation.

UA Record is not exclusive to Samsung or the Gear Fit2 Pro, but it works well here, taking advantage of all the Fit2 Pro’s capabilities. Set it before a workout, and it’ll continuously track your heart rate (instead of intermittently checking your heart rate, as the previous Gear Fit2 would do). By the end of the workout, you have a wealth of data to study about how intensely you’re training, and how hard (or easily) your heart is working.

It’s a smartly done app, although beware of chasing a high “Willpower” stat too much; this proprietary number from UA is essentially driven by your ability to work near peak heart rate capacity for much of a workout, and that’s fine for, say, a HIIT class. Just don’t chase high intensity when you’re trying to build muscle in a traditional gym workout situation, for example.

The Fit2 Pro, however, handles its job with the UA Record app well, delivering near-instant heart rate data that’s fairly accurate and consistent. The device also delivers smart music features and an intuitive, easy-to-use offline Spotify integration and 4GB of room for your tunes, more than enough for a few hours of afternoon training.

The built-in music player is sound. When it comes to music, the only knock on the Fit2 Pro is that you still can’t sideload your tunes onto the device from a computer; you’re locked into wirelessly transferring your songs from your phone. Samsung handled everything else this year, though, so maybe it can get to that next year.

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